School Week ending 25th January

Okay, so this week I am seriously tired!! I taught all day on Wednesday and am really paying for it now!! It was the first time and I did mostly practical activities all day! We made bread in Maths/Science using measuring and micro-organisms units, it was just for the record, absolutely fantastic bread, which I even ate having ensured the children scrubbed theri hands and the tables first!! The children did it all themselves and did a fantastic job! Anyway, in English we did hotseating as Captain Cook and Decision Alley, which was a useful drama skill, that I will use again in a more developed method in the future. The children in my class are really inexperienced at thinking for themselves and making their own decisions. This kind of activity really benefits their skills development. I then did more Science with another experiment and then writing it up and then RE which is currently the topic of weddings and the children made their own Order fo Service. In Science I used the digital microscope for the first time, it was okay, but not as good at detail as I would have liked it to be, the children got a bit frustrated that it wasn't in more detail.

One of the schools targets this term, actually their main target is thinking skills, so I've been doing a lot of work on this, including a good lesson today. I taught English after break and when the children came in I had all the curtains closed and the lights off and I was playing mysterious music through the computer and a PowerPoint continuous slideshow of Easter Island images. The children came in and sat silently as they ate their fruit snack looking at the images and then had to write at least 10 questions that they would like answered about the images. They came up with some fantastic ideas.

Tomorrow I am going to use Google Earth to show the children where Easter Island is and where some of the Moai are located and some of Australia too. This is a good tool to use to show the children what other environments look like.

Anyway, over and out!!